


Freedom's Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose

by Cuda (Scylla)



Category: Supernatural, Torchwood
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen, Season/Series 12, Season/Series 12 Spoilers, SuperWood, Superwho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-05
Updated: 2016-11-05
Packaged: 2018-08-29 03:47:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8474197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scylla/pseuds/Cuda
Summary: This was originally intended to be a quick alternate scene for Sam's eventual rescue at the end of S12 Episode 1. With Dean gone and Castiel potentially dead as well, Sam is lost in more ways than one. He's held out against the British Men of Letters so far, but he's in a fragile in-between of pain and hallucinations. Help comes from a source so unlikely, it may as well have been unicorns. Gorgeous unicorns, with Welsh accents and a give-em-hell attitude.





	

The hardest part about this, Sam thought, was being alone. His captors hadn't stirred for the better part of an hour now. When they left, Sam had the tag ends of hallucinations to chew on, and not much else.

The light outside his basement prison dimmed by degrees. Sam leaned into the rickety railing in the stairwell and stared straight ahead. He flipped through the day, committing what bites of information he had to memory. When he was sure his captors had gone to sleep or left, he'd bust out, and then he'd find out what happened to Castiel, and if Cas was still alive (or even if he wasn't), Sam would find what was left of Dean, and make sure nothing could get to it. The Bunker had cold storage; Sam could keep it safe. Until--

Keening panic overtook Sam's thoughts for a moment - until what? Until he came back again? Until Sam brought him back? With another impossible Hail Mary that broke the world even more? What right did he have to be that selfish, even if he had an option, after all the ways they'd shattered the world for each other before this--

No.

Sam pounced on himself. He closed his eyes, made his bruised and swollen hands into fists. The cuts on his knuckles from the mirror gapped; his nails bit into the slice in his palm.

The panic fought back. Should he look for a way? Was it right?

Yes. Yes, it was _always_ right.

Resuming his fixed stare at the opposite wall, Sam bared his teeth to the pain; flexed his bandaged foot until the burns throbbed.

Make it stone one, and build on that.

Sam collapsed into the railing, sagging back into his exhausted, wounded body. He felt the weight of himself, the pressure of his bruises on the hard wooden stairs. Just, no, he thought. No. Close the world down. Get out of here. Find Castiel. Get back to the Bunker. Make a plan.

Getting out of here required shoes, or a car. Required going through the house. The basement windows were too small, and barred on the outside.

Sam turned, studying the door, then the ceiling camera. He pictured his warden watching him, Ms British Men of Letters, hands cradling her phone and a mug of tea at her elbow. Was she upstairs? Was she far away? He knew the first floor layout from listening to their footsteps. The place she stopped the most frequently - presumably where she'd set up her tech - was a few steps down the hall and to the left of the main door. The basement entrance was on the opposite end of the house - and there was a back door right across from it. If he could get upstairs without alerting her, he could be outside in less than three seconds.

But he was barefoot.

Slowly, Sam got down from the stairs. He hobbled around the length of the room, searching for anything strong enough to work the pins out of the hinges. An awl; a brad; a stray shard of the mirror he'd shattered earlier.

Nada. The basement was clean, save for the solitary chair he'd been chained to earlier. Sam ran his hands over its frame, searching for hardware he could pry loose.

Quiet footsteps made the floorboards creak above Sam's head. He froze and looked up, squinting at the ceiling like it could give him answers. Maybe they'd figured out what he was looking for. Maybe they'd noticed the exposed hinges on this side of the basement door.

The footsteps stopped, and started again. They weren't his warden's heels, or her second's hard-soled boots (actually, she'd been gone a while), or their lackey's bargain basement oxfords. Sitting gingerly on the edge of the chair, Sam watched the ceiling, eyes following the slow progression of the stranger's movement. They moved down the hallway, towards what Sam thought might be his captors' war room.

The lights went out, throwing the basement into pitch dark. There were muffled shouts, and the footsteps went from a plod to a heavy-heeled sprint. Two shots, administered with a silencer. Two heavy thuds, hard enough to rattle the floor.

The footsteps moved out of the war room and trotted room to room. Sam briefly considered shouting for help. It might be Cas. But given how the last few days had gone, it probably wasn't. Sam felt his way from the chair to the stairs, and ducked beneath them.

He heard voices, two now, and a second set of footsteps joined the first. They headed for the back exit.

A few seconds later. The basement door knob rattled. Sam's gaze turned to the sound, finding no purchase in the dark. 

The knob rattled again, accompanied by soft scratches and clicks. Sam knew the sound of a lockpick when he heard one. He held his breath, every sense laser-focused on the sounds. Maybe Cas found him, Sam thought, and bit down hard on the golden rush of elation. The angel's battle plans still had that gloss of the Almighty on them - flash-boom shows of sheer force. If the house was warded against him, Cas would crash through the wall with a pickup truck before he picked the lock.

The tumblers clacked. The deadbolts above the knob slid back after that, slow. Sam watched the gaps of daylight grow, hungrily, muscles coiled like a sprinter on the blocks.

The door swung open and a flashlight beam cut a bright swathe through the basement gloom. A strange woman's voice echoed down the stairs. "Hello?"

Sam waited.

"Hello?" the stranger said again, and started down the steps. Through the open risers, Sam could see her. She was mottled with bruises, bare arms smudged with dirt or blood. Her dark hair slid out of a disheveled ponytail.

She was _tiny,_ Sam thought.

Her flashlight cut towards him. He didn't duck fast enough. The beam blinded him, and they gasped at each other.

The strange woman cursed in surprise. "Are you all right?" She asked, lowering the beam, "We need to move. She'll be back soon."

Whatever this was, it wasn't the basement. Sam came towards her, watching her eyes go rounder as he towered over her. "I'm Sam," he said.

"Tosh," replied the stranger, with a fuck-I'm-tired smile, "Follow me."

He did as Tosh asked, moving in the moment, forcing down the pain that grew with every step.

As they neared the back door, Sam caught motion from the corner of his eye. He whirled, slamming into the open palm of another woman; another stranger. Her hand was on his chest, the wide whites of her eyes standing out, dark lips like a gash in her pale face. Sam caught the gleam of a handgun - silencer still screwed in place - in her other fist. Out of the frying pan, Sam thought.

"Gwen!" Tosh's voice was hushed, "It's all right!"

Before he could react, the new stranger - Gwen - shoved him towards the back door, held open by Tosh. When the muzzle of her gun came down, it pointed away from him - down the hallway, towards the war room.

In the rectangle of faint light thrown from the back door, Sam saw dark shapes, collapsed in the hallway.

Human shapes, stretched like shadows.

"Move," Gwen ordered in a whisper.

Sam moved.

And bounced off of a wall.

Well, metaphysically speaking. A real solid wall would have made a refreshing change, Sam thought acidly. The open back door was suddenly filled with red light, as a concussive wave of energy shoved him back. He stumbled into Tosh, landed on his bad foot, and took them both down to the floor with a wall-rattling crash.

Gwen bent over them. "Tosh!"

Tosh made a pained noise and scrambled away, half dragged as Gwen helped her to her feet again.

No such help was forthcoming for Sam. "It's a ward," he groaned, "If they've warded this door, they've warded all the others."

"What does that mean?" Tosh asked, into the silence that followed.

Gwen stepped up to the open door. She waved her hands in front of her, feeling for the barrier. When she found it, she pulled a pen from her back pocket and - oh. Not a pen, Sam amended. The tip of it flashed blue in regular intervals, then red. Some sort of sensor, then. She pushed the other end as far into the barrier as it would go, eyes on her phone. The sensor passed right through, stopping only as Gwen's knuckles contacted the barrier.

She swore. "It's the same shit, Tosh."

Tosh crowded close. Sam forced himself to his feet and limped over to join them. By the light of Gwen's phone, he watched their faces fall. 

Sam squinted, shielding his eyes from the light of the door. As he did, he noticed the border trim on the wallpaper. It looked… off. "Either one of you got a flashlight?"

After a moment, Gwen leaned into Sam's peripheral vision. She pushed a thin silver flashlight into his hand. "What do you see?"

"Nothing yet," Sam murmured, "just—" Shielding his flashlight, Sam concentrated the circle of illumination on the doorframe.

Fine lines of careful red paint soaked the wallpaper surrounding the door. The markings were runes - Sam recognized a handful. He patted his pockets, only to remember that his captors had stripped him of everything, right down to the pocketknives.

"Here," whispered a voice at his shoulder, close enough to make the adrenaline surge in his blood. Sam looked back, to see Tosh holding up a switchblade. _His,_ by the size and design of the grip. She nodded to the paint. "Is that the source?"

"We'll know in a minute," Sam replied. He handed her the flashlight, told her where to hold it with a few terse words, and took the blade. It felt good in his hand; familiar. Sam didn't get sentimental about gear the way Dean did - he didn't believe they could afford it - but with a weapon in his palm, he felt like himself again. The last rags of Lady Tori's influence burned away.

As if thinking of her had summoned her, Sam saw the glow of twin high beams flash across the backyard, followed by the rising hum of an engine, dopplering close. Lady Tori was back, pulling into the front driveway on the other side of the house.

With fresh desperation and rage, Sam sliced into the wall.

"Hurry!" Gwen hissed.

Sam gritted his teeth and inhaled through his nose, forcing his hands to stay slow; stay precise. He wriggled his blade under the wallpaper, through the ancient paste, until he'd loosened an edge to get his fingernails under.

He _pulled_. A broad circle of wallpaper came away, runes and all, with a satisfying rip.

The ward in the doorway flashed red, and fizzled.

"You did it!" Tosh whispered triumphantly.

Down the hall behind them, the front doorknob turned. Lady Tori let herself into the house, prim heels sticking to the foyer floor as she stepped into a pool of drying blood.

But by then, Sam and his new companions were gone, shambling across the parched back lawn. Gwen and Tosh led him into the thin strip of woods at the back of the house (why did every bad guy pick a house with a forest in the backyard, Sam wondered). Clearly, nobody tended the space here, and the ground was choked with thorny brush that stabbed Sam's feet and tore at his bare arms. He kept his mouth shut and tried not to hobble.

On the other side of the trees was an SUV. Gwen fumbled for her key fob, and the vehicle came to life.

"Who are you?" Sam asked, out of breath from the march.

The second woman holstered her gun at the curb. She shot him a smile in the thin pool of streetlight. "Gwen Cooper," she said, in an accent that was at once like and unlike his kidnappers', "What's your name?"

He gave it.

"Look," Gwen went on, "Sorry about all this, Sam, but— are you a 'monster?'"

The way she said the word had threads of hesitation and distaste. Sam smiled at the irony. "Not the last time I checked."

"All right. We need a better word. I hate saying that, _fuck_ ," Gwen's eyes went down, and widened. "You've got no shoes?"

Sam followed her gaze, glad the shadow of the SUV made it too dark to see his feet. He could sure feel them though, throbbing around the adrenaline.

"Through the _woods_? And you said nothing?" Gwen demanded, more wounded than hostile.

"Gwen, we need to go," Tosh said firmly, before Sam could do more than gape.

With a grumble, Gwen conceded. She offered Sam a hand up into the front passenger seat.

He stared.

"Yes, no?" Gwen said in frustration, "Sorry, just, you're hurt--" She trailed off, looking down at his feet again - and the dark stain above his knee.

Sam couldn't argue, and didn't.

The SUV was running, no key in the ignition. As Sam's butt hit the seat, his brain hit him with permutations - two easy ways to steal the vehicle, three except he didn't really want to hurt anybody.

And anyway, what was the fucking point.

Gwen hopped up in the driver's seat. She put the SUV in drive, and Sam closed his eyes.

He felt the road smooth from gravel into blacktop. Gwen accelerated. She switched on the heater, and warm air stung his frozen feet.

The pain woke him up, with pins and needles like blood to a numb hand. This was really happening. He was free. Sam half expected to blink and find himself strapped in the chair again any minute, slapped out of another hallucination. Dean and Castiel's echoes were still in his mind, shouting accusations.

He inhaled, let it out slowly, and prayed. _Castiel, if you're out there, I'm--_

"So, Sam," Tosh interrupted, her voice sliding over his shoulder, "if you're not a-- if you're not one of their targets, why were you there? And how did you know how to disarm their— shield. Thing."

"That was my house," Sam lied.

"Mm. Bit Spartan living," Gwen said, "you've not even a fridge."

"I'm not there much," Sam replied with a shrug, "Since the divorce."

Silence in the cab for a few minutes. Sam turned towards the window. Flat Kansas fields surrounded them on all sides, silvery smooth with moonlight and pocked by clumps of forest, like the one they'd escaped through. The yellow triangle of a No Passing Zone sign slid towards them out of the dark. Sam waited for an intersection; for a highway shield.

He could tell they were still suspicious. Worrying about it was a struggle. "Why were you there?" Sam asked, distancing himself from their questions.

"Rescue mission," Gwen replied curtly.

"Me?" Sam wondered.

"Me," said Tosh, "and for an unlucky homeowner, you seemed very interesting to them."

The yellow striped guardrails of a bridge rolled towards them. The green sign at the side of the road glowed in their headlights, brighter as Sam's surging adrenaline opened his pupils. Oak Creek, it said.

"You're not our prisoner, Sam," Tosh went on, as if she'd heard his galloping thoughts, "the people who took you - they don't like us."

Gwen barked a laugh.

"We're trying to stop them," Tosh's voice hardened, "and we want to know why they're in America."

Sam considered this. There were plenty of reasons to hold his silence. Lose these two somewhere. Find Castiel. Get back to the Bunker. Make a plan.

"Uh, me," Sam said, "they're after me."

"Why?" Tosh wanted to know.

"I'm a… I'm a Hunter."

"And you hunt--" Gwen trailed off.

"--Monsters," Sam finished, "yeah."


End file.
